BSU players react to bowl selection

Dec. 3, 2012

Written by

Brandon Newman

As a member of the Notre Dame football team, he was in Orlando, Fla., practicing for the Champs Sports Bowl. He and his teammates tried to avoid looking at their phones and avoid reminding themselves they were spending the holiday far from family.

This year, Newman and his new teammates get the best of both worlds.

Between the Twitter chatter Sunday and a couple players made available Monday, the Cardinals seemed more than pleased about their selection to the Beef ‘O’ Brady’s bowl against Central Florida, set for 7:30 p.m. Dec. 21 on ESPN. The team had been rumored to possibly be going to several destinations, but instead of a winter trip to Boise, Idaha, they’ll be heading down to the warmth of St. Petersburg with sights set on the first bowl win in program history.

And they’ll still be able to make it home for the holidays after that.

“Most of the bowl games I’ve been in, in the past, have been right through that time or missing Christmas,” said Newman, who will travel for his fourth career bowl. “So it’s a great thing to really focus on football and then relax and enjoy your family.”

The players said they were already pretty sure of the destination when they went into the team meeting for coaches to announce the bowl selection late Sunday night. An array of outlets reported their matchup with Central Florida earlier in the day, and Newman said social media and a chain of text messages spread the word.

Center Dan Manick said the holiday factor was more of a bonus than something he thought about as the players studied bowl projections and discussed where they might land.

Manick is part of a small cadre of players on the team who have already experienced a bowl game. A few transfers went through the process at former schools, and seven fifth-year seniors were part of the 2008 team that went to the GMAC Bowl. But as Manick noted, the team, program and players went through a lot in nearly a half decade since.

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“It’s coming full circle,” Manick said. “Especially for my group of fifth-year seniors that came in, and we were 12-0 and thought college football was easy. We learned real quick that it was very, very hard. And then to have a chance to go to a bowl and ... kind of put that finishing stamp on our careers, I know the team’s excited.”

The Cardinals will be one of a record seven Mid-American Conference teams to go to a bowl this season, including Northern Illinois making history as the first conference team to make a BCS bowl. Manick called the Huskies’ Orange Bowl meeting with Florida State exciting for everyone in the “MAC universe.”

The players and coach Pete Lembo had not started looking too closely at 9-4 UCF, but were still enjoying where they’d landed in the unpredictable matrix of the bowl system.

“Beef ‘O’ Brady’s seemed to be one of those dreamlike opportunities,” Newman said. “A lot of people wanted to do Florida. They liked the time frame.

“Beef ‘O’ Brady’s was definitely circled on everybody’s calendar as a want rather than where we think we’re going to go.”

That's Logistics

With inclusion in the postseason and a bowl less than three weeks away, a new set of practical concerns arrive for Ball State. At his weekly press conference, Lembo said the athletic department is already working on the questions of organizing the trip and working practices around finals and graduation.

The Cardinals will bring many more players than the usual 66-player travel roster, which means introducing some of the younger ones to the business trip-style approach to a college football road trip.

“There’s a lot of moving parts right now with regard to logistics with this trip,” Lembo said.